Populism and the politics of redemption

Abstract

This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption through regaining possession: of a lower status, a wounded identity, a diminished or lost control. Highly moralized images of the past – historical or archetypal – are mobilized by populist leaders to castigate the present and accelerate the urgency of change in it. The argument is illustrated with Caesar’s Column, a futuristic novel written by the Minnesota populist leader Ignatius Donnelly. The complex and ambivalent structure of this dystopian novel – a textual source for the Populist Party manifesto in the 1890s, which stands in contrast with agrarian populism as everyday utopia – enables us to move beyond the polarized positions dominating the current debate. Reading Caesar’s Column ultimately shows that populism can be both a corrective and a danger to democracy, but not for the reasons usually stated in the literature.

Populism and nationalism revisited: A comparative study of the Spanish and Portuguese New Left

“…In fact, most forms of resentment are not associated with populism at all. There is populism when four elements occur simultaneously: a normative element (orientation to democratic norms of equality and popular sovereignty); a comparative element (sense of undeserved inferiority); a rivalry between parts (one part is deemed responsible for the undeserved suffering of the other) and a redemptive element in the form of an appeal to the restoration of democratic equality (Silva & Vieira, 2018a: 507, 2018b). These philosophically derived conditions provide clear analytical criteria by which to distinguish between distinctively populist claims and other, non‐populist political statements.…”

The Critical Masses: The Rise of Contemporary Populism and Its Relation to Solidarity, Systems, and Lifeworlds

“…Some examples may help illustrate this point. Da Silva and Vieira ( 2018 , 2019 ) emphasize the role of Aristotelian resentment, but their conception largely only works for populism focused on internal elite/masses interactions. Much populism focuses on communities’ relationships to the external world (Brubaker 2017 ).…”

“…This tension can be the result of conflict over the production and communication of knowledge (Brewer 2020 ; Ylä-Anttila 2018 ), or in the understandings of the foundations of legal systems (Blokker 2019 ). These friction points can produce a sense of resentment and desire for redemption of a broken system which foment populist movements (da Silva and Vieira 2018 , 2019 ; Yi, Phillips, and Lee 2019 ).…”

Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women’s rights

“…implicitly, more contemporary articulations of women’s rights) are not. Da Silva and Vieira (2018: 20–21) argue that populism combines resentment and ‘redemption’ through a ‘distinctive temporal-moral structure’: ‘it uses an image of a historical or archetypal past – democracy as it was or as it ought to have been’ combined with the idea that ‘the present is painful and the future must come now’. Thus, the Commission’s recurring theme of nature, which invokes conservative visions of the ‘natural family’, gender essentialism and patriarchal power structures, along with its emphasis on a return to the past when women’s rights were nonexistent or less established, resonates with patriarchal populism.…”